Day trip to Blackpool
IT IS a long time since Jim Callaghan came to Blackpool, to tell his party's conference that we could not spend our way out of trouble any more. This week saw Eddie George there to read the second lesson. Inflation, so he told the Trades Union Congress, was their enemy. Governors of the Bank of England have a special place in left-wing demonology, and this one has already been denounced by the TUC's ever- vocal president, John Edmonds. Instead of letting interest rates be set by a committee representing various forms of economic bird life, he should get someone who could see what was happening beyond the Bank's win- dowless wall, or so Mr Edmonds said, rather less politely. Mr George was too polite to say that cries of pain outside the wall formed no part of his committee's remit. All it is required to do is to bring the rate of inflation down to 21/2 per cent in two years' time — or up to 21/2 per cent if it seems to be undershooting. He might have added that until this last half century, 21/2 per cent would have seemed scandalously high, and that since then, undershooting on inflation has not been our country's problem. Its pol- icy makers have some credibility to make up, as Mr George knows, and will not help themselves by panicking at the first blast of Mr Edmonds's horn. I dare say that the Governor was content to come through his day trip to Blackpool and get back inside his wall.
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